into the author’s own years of personal experience, combining scholarship and hands-on practical involvement. Swilling argues deliberative democracy won’t do. We will need to tap into ‘thymotic rage’
aligning the feminine principle of care with energy to really change our deeply unsustainable practices.
A must-read.”
Professor Maarten Hajer, Urban Futures Studio, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
“Mark Swilling asks deep questions of all of us: what does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene?
What are the contours of a just 21st-century transition that can eradicate poverty and diminish inequality, without destroying natural systems across the world? How can we muster the positive rage necessary to fuel a passion for change and collective action to make this possible? He uses a mix of deep personal narrative, the practice of radical incrementalism in post-transition South Africa and meta-theoretical explorations to present responses to these existential challenges. A provocative read, especially for leaders from the Global South, who struggle with going beyond conventional binaries.”
Aromar Revi, Indian Institute of Housing Studies and United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network
“It is hard to imagine the fate of humanity unless our actions match our sustainability discourses. Just talking of sustainability in an unfair world of imbalanced wealth will lead us nowhere. Besides the time wasted while unfairly accumulated wealth grows, we would remain in the same world. This book presents a dimension that we have to apply and follow if humanity has to co-exist and survive on this one earth of ours.”
Gete Zeleke, Water and Land Resource Centre, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
“The Age of Sustainability sketches a way out of the ecological apocalypse, both ambitious and realistic.
Ambitious because it is a question of completely reshaping our institutions. Realistic because the author has no taste for revolutionary eschatologies but prefers precise roadmaps, rooted in the experience of grassroots communities whose lifestyle foreshadows our next world. At the crossroads of political science, economics, sociology and ethics, his book will be an indispensable reference for all those who want to build a just world in common.”
Gaël Giraud, Agence Française de Développement and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, France
“Global changes in the health of our climate, biodiversity and resources now threaten the very existence of life on Earth. These cannot be reversed by the generations of people and habits that caused them. It is now the next generation that must, for its own sake and for all of civilization, craft a better, more livable future. For this, all of us need a deeper and clearer understanding of the issues and possible solutions.
Mark Swilling’s book has done a wonderful job of providing this. It is now for all of us to do our job to bring about the transformation needed.”
Ashok Khosla, Development Alternatives, India, and former President of IUCN and former Co-Chair of the International Resource Panel
“This new book The Age of Sustainability by Professor Mark Swilling is a welcome addition to increasing our scientific knowledge on Just Transitions. The book provides useful insights in understanding the dynamics of transitions at a global scale. Professor Swilling makes compelling arguments to demonstrate that understanding sustainability and achieving the sustainable development goals require two necessary conditions: a theory of change and the passion for such changes.”
Elias T. Ayuk, Former Director, United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa, Accra, Ghana
“Swilling draws you into a breath-taking journey. Just transitions are to happen: eradicating poverty in our lifetime without destroying the planet’s natural systems. The book provides all it takes to make this conceivable: a solid metatheoretical footing, a plausible theory of change that escapes the dualism of
‘state or market’ by radical incrementalism focused on developing the commons, and a driver: rage that overcomes fear. A rage that aligns with the feminine principle of care rather than the male principle of
learns from experiences that supply the narratives in this book.”
Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Institute of Social Ecology, University of Klagenfurt, Austria and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Potsdam Institute on Climate Impact Research, Germany, and Vice President of the European Society of Ecological Economics
“This is a brave and ambitious book from a pioneering activist scholar. Mark Swilling offers a persuasive account of our contradictory times—dangerous and hopeful—while pointing to clear steps to become part of a just transition to a more sustainable civilisation. This masterstroke deserves the widest possible audience within the academy and far beyond. This is what praxis-driven, decolonial and free thought sounds like in its purest expression.”
Edgar Pieterse, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa
“Mark Swilling takes us back to an era of optimism and reassuringly posits that the advent of the SDGs is the beginning of a positive thinking era in his tour de force book, The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in a Complex World. Swilling brings to the fore that niggling thought that has been at the edge of your conscience all along but you could not put it into words. That the efforts to create a better world and a better future through ‘fixes’, whether they be policies, regulations, technology, better government, efficient use of resources etc., miss the point. That without understanding global (increasingly complex and diverse) dynamics within which power, entrenched inequality and lack of social justice looms large and are commonalities, and that without understanding the nature and catalytic impacts of transitions for good or otherwise, we will not get a better world or future for all, and continue at a ‘frenetic snails’
pace’.”
Tanya Abrahamse, former Chief Executive Officer of the South African National Biodiversity Institute
“In this transformational moment, we witness numerous futile attempts that try to resolve the confluence of challenges through reductionist over-simplification. There are also efforts that are based on inter- disciplinary interventions which are at best incremental or at worst lead to more detailed complexities.
This book provides a sound basis for understanding the dynamic complexity of the challenges we are facing through a transdisciplinary lens.”
Desta Mebratu, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and former Deputy-Director of the Africa Regional Office of the United Nations Environment Programme
“A timely and magnificent contribution on the dynamics of transition. A powerful analysis of sustainable pathways towards just transitions, a subject neglected by economic orthodoxy for decades. Swilling’s book makes a strong case in setting out the contested futures envisaged by the Sustainable Development Goals and offers a viable collective future for us all.”
A. Erinç Yeldan, Bilkent University, Turkey
“In this magisterial book, Professor Swilling builds on his earlier work on sustainable transitions and strives to address the question of how we might galvanize the ‘passion’ in facilitating positive change for the planet and its inhabitants. In this quest for action, that brings forth our best instincts of head and heart, he presents rigorous empirical analysis conducted throughout his academic career and as an advocate for social and environmental justice. He also presents a range of case analysis and pedagogic concepts for just transitions from across the world, but particularly from his home continent of Africa. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants a nuanced view of the global sustainable development agenda and how to maximize its impact across all strata of society.”
Saleem H. Ali, University of Delaware, USA
“New thinking beyond all variation of modernity is needed to govern the Anthropocene meeting the challenges of the 21st century. Mark Swilling taps into contemporary theories like system thinking, integral theory and theories of resonance to reflect the African experience, pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial, to contribute to, if not to lead, the relevant global discourses of sustainability and resilience looking for the more than needed new narrative.”
Louis Klein, European School of Governance, Germany
With transitions to more sustainable ways of living already underway, this book examines how we understand the underlying dynamics of the transitions that are unfolding. Without this understanding, we enter the future in a state of informed bewilderment.
Every day we are bombarded by reports about ecosystem breakdown, social conflict, economic stagnation and a crisis of identity. There is mounting evidence that deeper transitions are underway that suggest we may be entering another period of great transformation equal in significance to the agricultural revolution some 13,000 years ago or the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. This book helps readers make sense of our global crisis and the dynamics of transition that could result in a shift from the industrial epoch that we live in now to a more sustainable and equitable age. The global renewable energy transition that is already underway holds the key to the wider just transition. However, the evolutionary potential of the present also manifests in the mushrooming of ecocultures, new urban visions, sustainability-oriented developmental states and new ways of learning and researching.
Shedding light on the highly complex challenge of a sustainable and just transition, this book is essential reading for anyone concerned with establishing a more sustainable and equitable world. Ultimately, this is a book about hope but without easy answers.
Mark Swilling is Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Development in the School of Public Leadership, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, where he is the Co-Director of the Stellenbosch Centre for Complex Systems in Transition.
THE AGE OF SUSTAINABILITY
This series uniquely brings together original and cutting-edge research on sustainable development. The books in this series tackle difficult and important issues in sus- tainable development including: values and ethics; sustainability in higher education;
climate compatible development; resilience; capitalism and de-growth; sustainable urban development; gender and participation; and well-being.
Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, the series promotes interdisciplinary research for an international readership. The series was recommended in the Guard- ian’s suggested reads on development and the environment.
Metagovernance for Sustainability
A Framework for Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals Louis Meuleman
Survival: One Health, One Planet, One Future George R. Lueddeke
Poverty and Climate Change
Restoring a Global Biogeochemical Equilibrium Fitzroy B. Beckford
Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals Global Governance Challenges
Edited by Simon Dalby, Susan Horton and Rianne Mahon, with Diana Thomaz The Age of Sustainability
Just Transitions in a Complex World Mark Swilling
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THE AGE OF
SUSTAINABILITY
Just Transitions in a Complex World
Mark Swilling
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stepped into the future
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements xi
PART I
Points of departure 1
1 Introduction: change in the age of sustainability 3 2 Ukama: emerging metatheories for the twenty-first
century 35
PART II
Rethinking global transitions 73
3 Understanding our finite world: resource flows of
late modernity 75
4 Global crisis and transition: a long-wave perspective 108
5 Towards radical incrementalism 139
6 Evolutionary potential of the present: why ecocultures
matter 167
PART III
Making and resisting sustainability transitions 193
7 Developmental states and sustainability transitions 195 8 Global energy transition, energy democracy, and
the commons 227
9 Resisting transition: authoritarianism, energy dominance
and electro-masculinity 264
PART IV
Transdisciplinary knowing 293
10 Towards an evolutionary pedagogy of the present 295 11 Conclusion: reflections of an enraged incrementalist 317
Index 323
A vast array of amazing people have contributed to this book in various ways over the years, in particular the students who come to study at the Sustainability Insti- tute. However, specific mention must be made of my colleagues at Stellenbosch University located in the Sustainability Institute and the Centre for Complex Sys- tems in Transition. These include Jannie Hofmeyr, Rika Preiser, John van Breda, Josephine Musango, Jess Schulschenk, Scott Drimie, Beatrix Steenkamp, Holle Wlokas, Monique Beukes and Cornelia Jacobs. A special thanks to two people who read early drafts, listened patiently to my verbal meanderings over the years and kept me going: Amanda Gcanga and Megan Davies. Thank you to Tom Graedel and all his colleagues at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for host- ing me at Yale in 2018 and to Amanda Mondesir for her support and insights during my time in the United States. I must also acknowledge a core group of my peers who have helped me shape my ideas over the years: Edgar Pieterse, Maarten Hajer, Eve Annecke, Desta Mebratu, John Benington and John van Breda. Others whom I have engaged with and who influenced my thinking include Gael Giraud, Johan Hattingh, Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Bagele Chilisa, Kevin Urama, Andrew Boraine, Thuli Madonsela, John Spiropolous, Mmatshilo Motsei, Mamphela Ramphele, Gary Jacobs, Adriana Allen, Serge Salat, Mila Popovich, Aromar Revi, Janez Patoc- nik, Ernst von Weizsacher, Ashok Khosla, Simon Marvin, Haroon Bhorat, Phum- lani Nkontwana, Nontsikelelo Mngqibisa, the late Paul Cilliers and the many participants from African Universities in our Transdisciplinary Summer and Winter Schools over the years. The consistent collegial, institutional and moral support provided by the School of Public Leadership of Stellenbosch University and the Sustainability Institute, in general, is also acknowledged. Thanks to the Board of the Development Bank of Southern Africa for preventing me from detaching from the real world. Direct and indirect financial support for this project was received from the National Research Foundation and the Yale Institute of Biospheric Studies
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
(which sponsored my eight-month sabbatical at Yale University as the Edward P.
Bass Environmental Scholar for 2018) and the Open Society Foundation. The three reviewers are warmly acknowledged for providing insights that much improved the final result. Finally, without the personal inspirations catalysed by Ray Swilling and my students, none of this would have come to fruition.
PART I
Points of departure
Transforming our world
The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 by the United Nations (UN) was a turning point in our understanding of the challenges we face.
It marks the start of the sustainability age – a time of crisis and transition when contested interpretations of sustainability provide the coordinates for future imagi- naries. This does not refer to an age when sustainable modes of existence have been achieved in practice at the national and global levels. Building sustainable national and global systems may be the ultimate outcome if certain conditions materialize, in particular with respect to energy. For now, the SDGs – with all their imperfections – provide a shared language for engaging contested futures shaped by the language of the SDGs. This, read together with the real-world conditions discussed in this book that make the prolongation of industrial modernity in its current form unviable, makes it possible to argue that the sustainability age has begun. To be sure, the sig- nificance of the SDGs is questioned in the literature on post-developmentalism and degrowth (Escobar, 2015). Nevertheless, the Preamble to the document approved by the UN does conclude with the following profound words:
If we realize our ambitions across the full extent of the Agenda, the lives of all will be profoundly improved and our world will be transformed for the better.
What a “transformed” world looks like is slightly elaborated earlier in the Preamble by the statement that “[w]e are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want to heal and secure our planet”. Arguably, by adopting this com- mitment, the global community of nations has committed to eradicating poverty in our lifetime without destroying the planet’s natural systems. It is this commitment
1
INTRODUCTION
Change in the age of sustainability
that animates the sustainability age. Realizing this commitment is what this book will refer to as a just transition. But as Bruno Latour observed, such a commitment needs to be underpinned by a deep passion for change:
[W]e are trapped in a dual excess: we have an excessive fascination for the inertia of the existing socio-technical systems and an excessive fascination for the total, global and radical nature of the changes that need to be made. The result is a frenetic snails’ pace. An apocalypse in slow motion . . . Changing trajectories means more than a mere apocalypse, and is more demanding than a mere revolution.
(Latour, 2010) In practice, an unjust transition is highly likely: this will happen if the plan- etary systems we depend on are saved on terms that serve the elites, while poverty is allowed to persist. After reviewing the way in which ‘securocratic’ post–Cold War thinking and doomsday predictions of climate science have converged within military intelligence circles in the global North, Christian Parenti concluded that a just “political adaptation” is definitely not what is being contemplated by these strategists:
[T]he military-led strategy for dealing with climate change suggests another type of political adaptation is already under way, which might be called the
“politics of the armed lifeboat”: responding to climate change by arming, excluding, forgetting, repressing, policing and killing. One can imagine a green authoritarianism emerging in rich countries, while the climate crisis pushes the Third World into chaos. . . . The Pentagon and its European allies are actively planning a militarized adaption, which emphasizes the long-term, open-ended containment of failed or failing states – a counterinsurgency forever.
(Parenti, 2016:35–36) This outcome of an unjust transition – the ‘armed lifeboat’ – will emerge from one particular conception of sustainability, namely a conception that is focused on tech- nocratic solutions aimed at fixing the planetary systems to retain (what will become tightly micromanaged/monitored via the new 5G infrastructures) ecosystems with- out in any way reducing the powers and wealth of the rich and super-rich. As will be argued in Chapter 3, this would amount to a (militarized) ‘deep’ transition but definitely not a ‘just’ transition. A ‘just transition’ draws on traditions that are now particularly alive in the global South, namely commitments to social justice prem- ised on the assumption that without social justice the planetary systems can never be restored to support the web of life.
Whereas the adoption of the SDGs can be interpreted as (a highly contested) rec- ognition at the global policy level that fundamental change of some sort is required, a similar trend is evident in the academy, where interest in ‘transition studies’ has
emerged as a major and productive new field of interdisciplinary research. As Esco- bar argues,
The forceful emergence of transition discourses in multiple sites of academic and activist life over the past decade is one of the most anticipatory signs of our times. This emergence is a reflection of both the steady worsening of planetary ecological, social, and cultural conditions and of the inability of established policy and knowledge institutions to imagine ways out of such crises.
(Escobar, 2015:452) This rapidly expanding body of work generally referred to as ‘transition studies’
includes two quite different schools of thought. As discussed in detail in Chap- ter 3, there are those interested in the different dimensions of sustainability tran- sitions (STs), including socio-technical transitions (Grin, Rotmans, Schot, Geels, and Loorbach, 2010), socio-metabolic transitions (Haberl, Fischer-Kowalski, Kraus- mann, Martinez-Alier, and Winiwarter, 2011), techno-industrial transition (Perez, 2016), long-term development cycles (Gore, 2010) and now most recently ‘deep transitions’ (Schot and Kanger, 2018). In general, these authors are interested in the dynamics of structural change in light of socio-technical advances and ecological limits. Most do not necessarily subscribe to a post-capitalist alternative, nor do they pay much attention to the commons – the shared resources needed for all species to flower and prosper (Bauwens and Ramos, 2018).
The second group of authors “posit[s] a profound cultural, economic, and polit- ical transformation of dominant institutions and practices” (Escobar, 2015:454).
Following Escobar’s excellent overview, this group envisages a post-development, non-neoliberal, post/non-capitalist, biocentric and post-extractivist future and includes those who write from the global North about the commons (Bollier and Helfich, 1978), transition towns (Hopkins, 2018), degrowth (D’Alisa, Demaria and Kallis, 2015), the “Great Transition”1, the “Great Turning” (Macy and Brown, 1998), the “Great Work” (Berry, 1999), “Enlivenment” (Weber, 2013), transition from an Age of Separation to an Age of Reunion (Eisenstein, 2013) and the transi- tions from “Enlightenment to Sustainability” (Fry, 2012). In the global South, the reference points for this perspective are post-developmentalism (Escobar, 1995),
“crisis of civilisation” (Ahmed, 2017), the Latin American narrative of Buen Vivir and the rights of nature, the commons and communal initiatives (see certain case studies in Bollier and Helfich, 1978) and transitions to post-extractivism (Lang and Mokrani, 2013).
The problem with the second group of transition studies referred to here by Escobar as the “post-development”/“post-capitalist” perspective is that it may be strong when it comes to critique and alternative visions, but it is relatively weak when it comes to understanding how fundamental change will actually happen in practice. Who, in other words, can best shape the directionality of the ‘great transformation’?
The sustainability transitions literature and the post-development literature referred to in the previous two paragraphs need not be regarded as antithetical.
They frame what this book is about – a search for a way of understanding the global dynamics of transition and what this means for actions aimed at bringing about a transition that envisages radical alternatives to the dominant configurations of power and mainstream practices.2
I will argue in this book that we need a better understanding of a just transi- tion. A just transition is a process of increasingly radical incremental changes that accumulate over time in the actually emergent transformed world envisaged by the SDGs and sustainability. The outcome is a state of well-being (Fioramonti, 2015) founded on greater environmental sustainability and social justice (including the eradication of poverty). These changes arise from a vast multiplicity of struggles, each with their own context-specific temporal and spatial dimensions.
What really matters is the evolutionary potential of the present (a phrase bor- rowed from Snowden, 2015) and the incrementalist actions that are required to instigate the changes that are needed. The question then becomes: what is emerging now that is suggestive of the kind of future embodied in the vision of a transformed world? And what are the conditions that make these changes possible, and cumu- latively do they add up to more than the sum of the parts? In short, what is our understanding of change?
Drawing on transdisciplinary studies, I will persistently explore throughout this book the kind of knowledge that equips us to act in an increasingly complex world.
Transdisciplinary research makes a useful distinction between three types of knowl- edge (Regeer and Bunders, 2009): systems knowledge, which is knowledge about current social-ecological systems in order to arrive at conclusions about whether they need to be changed or not; target knowledge, which is knowledge about desired endstates or futures; and transformation knowledge, which is knowledge about change, that is, how to get from where we are now to where we want to be. This book has been written as a contribution to the kind of transformation knowledge that I believe is required in the world today. Obviously, this cannot be done without systems knowledge, which will of course be discussed in all the chapters. Target knowledge is also present in many chapters but not in the form of prescriptive policy solutions. Systems and target knowledge without transformation knowledge is what causes the consternation expressed in Latour’s quote mentioned earlier.
Just as a revolution in the classical sense (as in storming the Bastille or seizing the Winter Palace3) is unlikely, so too is it unlikely that the transition will be triggered by a sudden cataclysmic apocalypse. We need a theory of change that is less obsessed with uni-centric structural change or faith in sudden ecologically driven system collapses on the other (or some mix of both). Instead, such a theory should be more focused on the efficacy of a multiplicity of incremental changes that emerge from socio-political struggle and provide glimpses of certain kinds of desired futures, whether or not there are an increasing number of catastrophes along the way. We need to avoid both faith in techno-fixes and the faithlessness of doom and gloom.
As will be argued in the various chapters of this book, this middle way – often referred to as post-capitalism – lies between market fundamentalism and statism (both the socialist and social democratic varieties) (see Chapter 2). As discussed fur- ther in Chapter 2, the most coherent perspective within the broader post-capitalist spectrum of thinking is associated with the burgeoning literature on the ‘com- mons’ and the practices of ‘commoning’. The commons literature reveals the prac- tical governance arrangements that are neither statist nor market oriented, without excluding aspects of both. Commoning – the practices involved in building the commons – gives radical incrementalism a specific normative direction (see the end of Chapter 2 for further discussion of post-capitalism and the commons).
When read together, the strategy for building the post-capitalist commons is what will be referred to in this book as ‘radical incrementalism’. In many ways, this book has been written in defence of radical incrementalism (Chapters 5 and 6) during a time of deep transition (Chapter 4) – an alternative to a belief in revolutionary ruptures, sys- temic collapses or over-optimistic modernizing techno-fixes to ‘green’ the status quo.
Notwithstanding the dreams of many revolutionaries who have called for world revolution time and again, the classical conception of revolution (from approximately the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries) is inescapably constrained within the boundaries of the nation-state and is focused on the seizure of state power (i.e. the
‘nation-state’). From the French and Russian revolutions against corrupt aristocra- cies to revolutions in the Americas waged against imperial control during the 1700s and 1800s by occupying settler communities (who, of course, oppressed local indig- enous populations), the anti-colonial revolutions in Africa in the 1950s/1960s, the
‘velvet revolutions’ in Eastern Europe in the late1980s/early 1990s and the ‘second wave’ of African revolutions against tyrannical regimes (e.g. Ethiopia) during the 1990s (including, of course, the democratic transition in South Africa in 1994), the focus has been the seizure of state power within the boundaries of a nation-state despite the mounting evidence that the nation-state may have become a highly problematic reference point for progressive politics (see editorial to a special edition of Territory, Politics Governance by Agnew, 2017). The assumption was that state power would provide revolutionary elites with the means to transform society more or less in a top-down way. While this may be partially true in some instances, my experience with the South African democratic project is this: on the morrow of the revolution the challenges remain – how to transform institutions, create working experiments and demonstrate that alternatives are possible without succumbing to the tempta- tions of certainty, whether of the statist or the market fundamentalist varieties. After all, it’s the quest for certainty that is the greatest threat to democracy.
Most of those who worry about the state of the world’s environment share the broad scientific consensus that has evolved over the past three decades (Barnosky, Brown, Daily, Dirzo, Ehrlich, et al., 2014). In essence, this book fully accepts the opening sentence of the authoritative summary of this consensus:
Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. . . . Human impacts are causing alarming levels of harm to our planet. As scientists who study the interaction
of people with the rest of the biosphere using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that humans are damaging their ecological life support systems is overwhelming.
(Barnosky, Brown, Daily, Dirzo, Ehrlich, et al., 2014:79) Barnosky et al. identify five primary drivers of global change that all interact with each other: climate disruption, extinction of biodiversity, the wholesale loss of vast ecosystems, pollution and ever-increasing consumption of resources. They con- clude as follows:
The vast majority of scientists who study the interactions between people and the rest of the biosphere agree on a key conclusion: that the five inter- connected dangerous trends listed above are having detrimental effects and, if continued, the already-apparent negative impacts on human quality of life will become much worse within a few decades.
(Barnosky, Brown, Daily, Dirzo, Ehrlich, et al., 2014:81) This book also accepts the widely held scientific view that the “great acceleration”
since the 1950s has been the primary driver of the processes that have resulted in this approaching tipping point (Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney and Ludwig, 2015). This publication updates the well-known hockey stick graphs that reveal how rapidly consumption has increased since the 1950s with respect to, for exam- ple, population, GDP, foreign direct investment, energy use, fertilizer consumption, water use and transportation. These increases in consumption more or less track the upward trends in environmental indicators with respect to carbon dioxide, meth- ane, ocean acidification, nitrogen, domestic land use and so forth.
If the tipping point is approaching rapidly and the unabated great acceleration remains a key driver, the question this book asks is simple: what is our theory of change? This is the question posed by Latour in the quotation above.
There is also a widely held scientific view that we now live in the “Anthropocene” – an era when humans – and by implication, all humans in equal measure – have become a geophysical force of nature (Crutzen, 2002). Many who share this some- what problematic view (for the Anthropocene debate, see Malm and Hornborg, 2014; Maslin and Lewis, 2015) seem to think that a cataclysmic catastrophe is inevi- table, with a climate-related catastrophe probably the most likely catalyst of radi- cal change. Inspired by writers like James Lovelock (Lovelock, 2006), this ‘doom and gloom’ brigade have largely given up on the potential for socially induced changes commensurate with the challenges we face. In other words, these people have given up on what Paul Erhlich called “conscious evolution” (Ehrlich, 2002):
a broad process of socio-cultural evolution induced by the conscious construction of alternative narratives about the future of humankind on the planet. Their alter- native is a grand ecological reset that could, in turn, wipe out more than half the
global population. One can only wonder what would happen if they are right: will runaway climate change and its consequent destructive natural disasters for humans (in particular) usher in the post-Anthropocene – a time when humans lose control?
A similar pessimism pervades those who prefer to refer to the ‘capitalocene’ – an era when capital seems so arrogantly hegemonic and all powerful (Moore, 2016).
No matter what happens, it is always, ultimately, about the reassertion of capitalist power. This gives rise to the oft-quoted phrase: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
The alternative to ecological catastrophe or an anti-capitalist revolution is what one could call ‘radical incrementalism’. Most people who share the view that radi- cal transformation is needed without assuming that a classical revolution is neces- sary (or that we should wait for catastrophe) tend to share an assumption that the best way to bring about change is via dialogue of various kinds (Hajer, Nilsson, Raworth, Bakker, Berkhout, et al., 2015). However, it seems to me that there is a certain incommensurability about – as Latour put it in the quote above – our
“excessive fascination for the total, global and radical nature of the changes that need to be made” (Latour, 2010) and our obsession with dialogue – the latter seems so feeble compared to the great heroic field and street battles of the old-fashioned revolutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dialogue is so often presented as a kind of panacea – as long as we are having dialogues at global round tables, national consultative meetings, city-wide gatherings and town hall meetings and in our local projects, all will be well. There is now an entire global industry of dialogue facilitators employing thousands of people using a countless number of formalized ‘futuring methodologies’ and almost everything that needs to be implemented now must be preceded by dialogue.
It is this obsession with dialogue that has emerged in response to the shift from a structure-centred notion of ‘government’ to the relational notion of ‘govern- ance’ over the past few decades (Jessop, 2016). If governance is about collaboration between diverse stakeholders, dialogue becomes a key capability, often requiring the skills of a trained facilitator. While there is nothing wrong with most kinds of dialogues per se, what seems to be lacking is a theory of change that can be used to assess the efficacy of any given set of dialogues as they ideally express themselves in action. For me, this is what radical incrementalism can offer – a way of thinking about actions that change things rather than dialogues that are held in the hope that somehow they will bring about change.
This introductory chapter should, ideally, be read together with Chapter 2.
Chapter 2 provides a conceptually dense elaboration of the meta-theoretical syn- thesis that informs the meso-level analyses of various dimensions of the global crisis and potential solutions that are discussed from Chapter 3 onwards. However, read- ers unfamiliar with social theory can skip Chapter 2. Subsequent chapters are writ- ten in ways that do not presuppose an understanding of Chapter 2. What follows in this chapter after a personal account of my journey of discovery as an activist academic is a succinct summation of my axiological point of departure, followed by a summary overview of the argument elaborated across the chapters of the book,
including a simplified description of the concepts in Chapter 2 that get implicitly deployed in the subsequent chapters.
Reflections of an enraged incrementalist:
a personal journey
The arguments presented in the rest of this book are derived in part from who I am, my experiences and my identity. Thus, before proceeding to elaborate a conceptual framework that justifies the use of the notion of radical incrementalism and why I believe rage is so significant in today’s discussion about change, it is necessary to relate the personal journey that brings me to this particular vantage point on the world we live in and why I think an alternative is already emerging. By doing so, I am declaring what is referred to in the social sciences as my ‘positionality’, while remaining faithful to my commitment to a balance between epistemology and ontology (explained further in Chapter 2).
For the past 17 years, I have devoted a large part of my energy to the building of South Africa’s first intentional socially mixed ecologically designed community (see Swilling and Annecke, 2012: Chapter 10). I did this as part of my involvement in the wider process of democratization that led to South Africa’s first democratic non- racial elections in 1994 (see my interview in Callinicos, 1992; Swilling, 1999) and the struggle against the tyrannical rule of President Jacob Zuma that ended in 2018 (see the foreword and prologue to Chipkin and Swilling, 2018). At the centre of the Lynedoch EcoVillage was the Sustainability Institute, which I co-founded in 1999 with my former wife, Eve Annecke. This experience has fundamentally reshaped my research and teaching because of the way it allowed me to connect a broader vision of the future (that inspired my involvement in the struggle for democracy) with what it means to build something in practice through experimentation and innovation. At the centre of this EcoVillage is the Sustainability Institute (SI)4 – an extraordinary space for learning and activism. Edgar Pieterse, Naledi Mabeba, Roshieda Shabodien and Adrian Enthoven were the founding board members and Eve Annecke was the founding director.5
The Lynedoch EcoVillage has matured and is nearly 20 years old now.6 Most of the core founding group are still involved in one way or another, and the community- based collaborative governance system has remained largely intact and viable. The socio-technical systems to sustainably manage water, sewage, solid waste and energy that were designed in the late 1990s have proven to be viable (except for the verti- cally integrated wetland [VIW] that was replaced in 2016 with a horizontal wetland which, to date, has not performed much better than the VIW). In 2017, ESKOM – South Africa’s state-owned electricity utility – installed a state-of-the-art renew- able energy smart grid, which includes 1,500 watts of photovoltaic (PV) panels, an inverter, batteries and smart meter for every house at no cost to the EcoVillage. For ESKOM, the EcoVillage is an experimental laboratory in grid-tied sustainable and renewable energy smart grid systems. (They needed a socially mixed community to set up their lab and sadly could find only one.)
The trees and gardens have matured, and, as originally anticipated (following Christopher Alexander’s ‘pattern language’), it is the ‘spaces-in-between’ that nature makes possible rather than the buildings themselves that make it such a beautifully textured holding space (Alexander, 1977). It is not the product of the imagination of a single architect or designer, and as a result a wide range of aesthetic preferences are expressed across income groups; as a consequence, many different materials have been used. Quite often, though, the selection of materials is determined by what banks or government funding agencies will accept, and they have preconceived ideas about what these should be (Swilling, 2015). The original idea of having small sites with 80% coverage by buildings succeeded in creating a large amount of shared space. This is particularly important for families who moved there because they wanted children to feel safe and have large open spaces to roam.
Before reflecting on the dynamics of experimentation during the design and construction of the EcoVillage within the wider context of national democratiza- tion and development in post-1994 South Africa, more needs to be said about the story of the SI. The inspiration for the vision of the SI came from experiencing two places – the Schumacher College in Devon, UK, and the Goree Institute on Goree Island, Senegal. The former inspired the possibility of a pedagogical approach that combines what Schumacher College calls “soil, soul and society” – or alter- natively “ecology, spirit and community”. The latter demonstrated what can be done to create an authentic African aesthetic and working space. The result was a versatile space that is absolutely ideal for interactive, immersive, discussion-based experiential learning. There are flat open classrooms that can be constantly rear- ranged, outside spaces for group discussions and land art experiences, a large hall for gatherings from yoga stretches to communal meals, a café with coffee and organic food, small meeting spaces, a beautiful sense of embracement by nature’s greenery and organic food gardens where students work before class – as I tell my students,
“I judge how much you know about sustainability by how much dirt there is under your fingernails”.
Over the past 17 years, I have coordinated an academic programme that has expressed in practice a desire to synthesize discussion-based learning about an African interpretation of the sustainability challenges underpinned by complexity theory (see chapter 10). However, instead of being satisfied with critique, I have focused on what I have often referred to as ‘phronesis’ – the capacity for sound judgement appropriate to the context (Flyvbjerg, 1998). This is the third of Aris- totle’s three conceptions of knowledge – the other two being techné (technical knowledge) and episteme (general wisdom). In short, going against the fashion- able postmodernist predilection for critique and ‘deconstruction’, our emphasis has been on action appropriate to the context within an actually existing experimental community. The programme has been delivered by a unique partnership between the SI, the School of Public Leadership and the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University. The academic programme comprises a Diploma in Sustainable Development (for school leavers), a Postgraduate Diploma in Sustainable Development (honours-level equivalent), an MPhil in Sustainable
Development, a Transdisciplinary PhD in Complex Systems in Transition and post- doctoral research. Connecting complexity theory, sustainability science, transdisci- plinary research and social innovation, this combination of degrees delivered within an actual living and learning context with this specific pedagogical orientation is unique in the world.
Unsurprisingly, the SI is now led and managed by graduates from the pro- gramme, and an increasing number of modules are taught by former graduates.
They bring with them their own orientations. For most of the first eight to ten years, the focus was on sustainability – reconciling development with ecological sustainability expressed in the book Just Transitions (Swilling and Annecke, 2012).
Since about 2000, there has been a tendency to emphasize transitions to a more sustainable world, reflected in the interest in global transitions (Swilling, Musango and Wakeford, 2015, 2016), urban transitions (Robinson et al., 2013; Hodson, Mar- vin, Robinson and Swilling, 2012; Swilling, Robinson, Marvin and Hodson, 2013), resilience (Preiser, Biggs, de Vos and Folke, 2018) and transdisciplinarity (Muhar, Visser and van Breda, 2013; van Breda and Swilling, 2018). From about 2015–2016 onwards, the new generation has started to shift the orientation towards social entrepreneurship and social innovation. Phronesis and a sense of the spiritual have remained consistently significant (Annecke, 2013). My intuition tells me that the next wave waiting to break will be about the commons and commoning.
I come from a generation that believed it was possible to imagine and build a progressive democratic state (Swilling, 2008) – the new generation are disillusioned with both the state and free market thinking. Social entrepreneurship and innova- tion attract them as a kind of ‘third way’, but they realize this still means building capable states and viable socially embedded markets. However, unlike others in this burgeoning field, repairing the future becomes the new raison d’etre for the endeav- ours of this particular group.
Starting in 1999, I spent a decade pretty obsessed with the idea of imagining, designing and constructing a socially mixed community that could also live in ecologically sustainable ways. Without being able to draw on a precedent-setting model in the South African context, we had to muddle our way through, working closely with Gita Goven and Alastair Rendall, both architects (now with their own Cape Town practice called ARG Design). We visited other places, such as Crystal Waters near Brisbane, Australia, Vauban in Germany and Tlolego in the North West Province; I built for my family a sustainable log house in Kuthumba, a largely white, middle-class and socially unsuccessful ecovillage near Plettenbergbay.7
I played a leading role in the process of stitching together the key components of the Lynedoch project: the urban and architectural design, an appropriate mode of community-based governance, a viable financial model (including raising the loan finance and obtaining housing subsidies from the government), convincing the pro- vincial government to fund a new intersection (costing R6 million) and an effec- tive project management system to ensure infrastructures and houses were built within the confines of a very tight budget (which was only partially successful).
It was a decade of continuous experimentation that ran in parallel to the building
of the academic programme and ongoing involvement in the wider dynamics of a young democracy. It was a decade that also, effectively, destroyed my health.
What is not recognized, even by those who know a lot about the history of the development since 1999, is the critical role played by various state institutions in making possible the Lynedoch EcoVillage and the SI. This is probably best revealed by stating the extent of funding from various state institutions: housing subsidies for 11 houses from the Western Cape Government’s Department of Local Government and Housing (R35,000 each); R6 million from the Western Cape Government’s Department of Transport and Public Works to restructure the intersection between Baden Powel Drive and Annandale Road (which was a development approval condition imposed by Stellenbosch Municipality); subsidies for the labour costs of constructing the 11 houses built for people who qualified for housing subsi- dies, which came from the Construction Sector Education and Training Authority, which, in turn, lowered the costs of the houses for the buyers; help from the West- ern Cape Government’s Department of Education, which has consistently from the start contributed to the operating costs and rental of the primary school, even after it was converted from a government school into the Spark School (i.e. a pri- vate school); the continuous annual flow of capital and operating funds into the SI from Stellenbosch University (a publicly funded university); the off-and-on support for the preschool from the Department of Welfare; the recently completed baffle- reactor-connected horizontal wetland funded by the Western Cape Government’s Department of Transport and Public Works as a component of the new road that went through the previous dysfunctional horizontal wetland; the urban design and infrastructure design costs funded by the World Bank–linked International Finance Corporation (with support from Stellenbosch Municipality); the recent R2.5 mil- lion renewable energy smart-grid system installed by ESKOM; and last, but not least, the R3 million loan from the state-owned Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) obtained in 1999 for the infrastructure (water, energy, sanitation, roads). Every single one of these interventions entailed dozens of conversations and meetings. The SI provided the organizational space and capacity for making all this happen. In reality, the SI animated, integrated and coordinated a multi-pronged state investment strategy in innovations that resulted in what exists now, namely a community-based socially mixed ecologically sustainable urban settlement that expresses in practice the values encapsulated within the South African Constitution.
The likelihood of these state institutions collaborating and doing this without an external animating agency like the SI is as likely as a sandstorm transforming itself into an adobe brick house.
The state’s role in the making of the Lynedoch EcoVillage provides some confir- mation that progressive, innovative, state-supported development is possible.8 How- ever, the vision and coordination capacity came from outside the state, that is, it was provided by an NGO – the SI – working with a university partner (Stellenbosch University) that actively engaged and transacted with a multiplicity of state insti- tutions. Some of these state institutions were strong institutions but unable to act strategically (e.g. Western Cape Department of Local Government and Housing),
while others were weak institutions and reasonably well intentioned (e.g. Stellen- bosch Municipality). Without this capacity to organize the state from the outside to mount and execute a multi-year strategy, the Lynedoch EcoVillage, the Spark School and the SI in its current form would not have existed. Factor in the long- term support and commitment provided by the DBSA and the nearby Spier Wine Estate (owned by the Endhoven family) from day one (including approximately R3 million in grants and buildings) and the full dimensions of the partnership approach animated by the SI start to emerge. This holds many lessons for those who mistakenly expect these kinds of innovations to emerge exclusively from within the state or from NGOs funded by the corporate sector.
It is this experience that has made me particularly sympathetic to Mazzucato’s conceptions of the role of the state in the innovation cycle (discussed later in this chapter and in Chapters 2 and 6, even though she is not sensitive to this inside- outside dynamic) and Jessop’s notion of ‘collibration’ which refers to the ‘govern- ance of governance’ by a new generation of institutions that facilitate partnering, stakeholder engagement and strategic alignment across institutional boundaries (explained further in Chapter 2). I also recognize that they both place insuffi- cient emphasis on the role of the exogenous animator operating outside the formal state sector. However, reflecting back on nearly two decades of working with state institutions to build a community-controlled urban space without any personal financial reward (as a shareholder or property developer) has led me to realize that we as a group were (largely unwittingly) part of a much wider global movement to rebuild a shared ‘commons’. We were – in the language of this movement – ‘com- moners’ collaborating to create a shared space that could be the home for families, schools, social enterprises and university programmes. As discussed further at the end of Chapter 2, institutionalizing the governance of the commons is an authentic
‘third way’ between statist and market-driven solutions. The way we worked to har- ness the resources of several different state institutions was how we incrementally built an ecocultural commons that has a very distinct sense of a social common- wealth reflected in the ‘buzz’ and energy that infuses the entire space every day.
The Lynedoch EcoVillage experience was the start of my relationship with the DBSA. Established during the Apartheid era to fund infrastructures that supported
‘bantustanization’, the DBSA, after 1994, became a key thought leader and anima- tor of developmentally oriented infrastructure, albeit largely within a neoliberal framework. In 2013, I was appointed by the minister of finance to the Board of the DBSA, and, in December 2018, I was appointed chairperson of the Board with effect from 1 January 2019. This experience reinforced my conviction that Maz- zucato is spot on when she argues that state-owned development finance institu- tions (DFIs) have a key role to play in reducing risk during the early phases of the innovation cycle (Mazzucato and Penna, 2015). The DBSA played a key role in establishing and funding South Africa’s rapidly expanding renewable energy sector.
During the course of 2018, it adopted a progressive development vision that posi- tioned it to intervene more meaningfully in actual development processes, with the Lynedoch EcoVillage acting as a key role model.
In 2017, I led a team of academics that published a report entitled “Betrayal of the Promise: How South Africa Is Being Stolen” (Swilling, Bhorat, Buthelezi, Chipkin, Duma, et al., 2017; later extended and published under the title “Shadow State” see Chipkin and Swilling, 2018). One day, while I was in the midst of writing this depressing analysis of how our dreams of democracy were dashed on the rocks of corruption and inappropriate economic policies over a 20-year period that left 95% of all asset wealth in the hands of 10% of the population, I took a group on a tour of the Lynedoch EcoVillage (which I had not done for some time). I was over- whelmed by the huge contrast between what I was writing about and the exquisite beauty and ‘alive energy’ of the place. As I led the group around I described – as I always do on these so-called ‘tours’ – how over nearly two decades and more we experimented with low-cement construction, resulting in many different build- ing systems (from four different kinds of adobe brick, to recycled bricks reclaimed from landfills, to wood, to sandbags, to light steel frame clad with fibre cement and bricks made from waste construction materials); many different building designs (with shortcomings when it came to orientation); renewable energy starting with solar hot water heaters/no electric stoves (which halved the cost of the internal electrical cabling system and monthly electricity expenses of each household) and ending with a fully fledged so-called smart mini-grid system funded by ESKOM and installed in 2017; worm filters and vertical/horizontal wetlands to treat the sewage; wind chimneys and a rock store to cool the main building; septic tanks for every two to three houses (not for treatment purposes but to prevent inap- propriate materials being flushed down toilets that then become the community’s problem); small plots to maximize shared space; two prices for every plot – one if you qualified for a government housing subsidy and the other if you did not, thus ensuring a social mix (instead of allocating the poor to a specific area and the rest to another); a democratically elected home owners association that approves who can buy a property and the designs of new houses; an innovative financing mechanism that enabled poorer households to borrow funds internally and get three forms of cross-subsidization (costs of labour, land and infrastructure); and the placement of an innovative primary school and Montessori preschool at the very centre of the community – what we have often called child-centred urban planning (i.e. an urban design governed by the principle that from any point in the neighbourhood
‘you should be able to see a child’).
All these innovations, and many more, emerged from a process of experimenta- tion that was uninformed by a particular theory of change or, indeed, of experi- mentation, nor were we aware of the literature on the governance of the commons.
In Just Transitions it was referred to as “adaptive design” – how to create a material environment that orients people towards resolving their own problems ‘adaptively’
in collective ways rather than depending on technical expertise to resolve seem- ingly technical problems (Swilling and Annecke, 2012: Chapter 10). With hind- sight, what we did was profoundly incrementalist, and the lesson is clear – systemic change takes time, and what is possible is context specific. Innovation, experimenta- tion and incrementalism are themes explored further in this book.
Undoubtedly enraged by the evils of the past, the founders of the Lynedoch EcoVillage (primarily the members of the first board of a non-profit company called Lynedoch Development set up in 1999 to drive the development) were inspired by a sense that the grand dream of a post-apartheid non-racial South Africa could be miniaturized and lived out in reality. In practice, we took ourselves into the future and never escaped what it meant to be human, including attributing the cause of nearly all legitimate and illegitimate conflicts to the persistence of racism of various kinds. For some, this will prove why we cannot aspire to live relation- ally – “it is just not how we are” is an oft-repeated refrain I’ve heard over the years.
On the other hand, if we are serious about conscious evolution, we have to find another way of being (post-)human by being a part of experiments that call forth a very different set of desires and passions to those encouraged by individualistic consumer-driven security-oriented urbanism that so many aspire to achieve (in particular the bizarre phenomenon called ‘suburbs’ built as they are around spend- ing in malls, surrounded by security fences, with schools built like prisons on the margins – and then we wonder why things don’t change).
In 2007, the South African government’s Department of Science and Technol- ogy nominated me onto a newly established expert panel initiated by what was then called the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). My term ended in late 2019. During this time, I participated in the co-authoring of several global reports on material resource consumption and urban transitions. In many differ- ent ways, my contributions were shaped and influenced by what I had learnt in microcosm during the preceding decade and a half of experimentation and failure.
Up until this point, my description of the Lynedoch EcoVillage and the SI is completely depersonalized and thus somewhat ahistorical. It leaves out the obvious fact that I am a white male, brought up in a middle-class home with a private school education (albeit in anthroposophically based Waldorf Schools, with parents who were non-practicing Jews and committed vegetarians – unusual for the 1960s!).
They got divorced when I was 17, and my gay mother has lived with her current partner – whom she married when this was legalized after 1994 – for 32 years. And it also leaves out the fact that what we were trying to do at Lynedoch is to go up against the harsh realities and logics of one of the most violent, racist, misogynistic and unequal societies in the world. With 95% of all wealth in the hands of 10%
of the population (Orthofer, 2016) (most of whom, of course, are white, and then most of those whites who own property are males), the psycho-emotional impli- cations are so horrifying that it is as if it is collectively unthinkable by all South Africans in any terms – race, gender or class. As the book by a new generation of young black writers – Writing What We Like – makes so clear, rage permeates this conundrum (Qunta, 2016). In a contribution to this volume, Mathe reveals what most fans the flames of rage when he writes how “[I]t irks me when white people see the flames of black people’s anger, then use Mandela’s ideas of peace and rec- onciliation to extinguish them. Firstly, this anger has value” (Mathe, 2016: l. 1088).
Herein lies the conundrum: if South Africans agreed to become a ‘rainbow nation’
without addressing the real cause of black rage (and, indeed, women’s rage), where
does that rage go? And from this, what must a white male do when so little changes and so much rage remains suppressed?
I started asking these questions in the 1980s, preferring the writings of Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko (and internationally the life of Malcolm X rather than Martin Luther King Jr. or Ghandi) to the then more fashionable Marxist texts about class that the ‘white left’ loved so much – texts that seemed to me to ignore consciousness and, therefore, race. But the answers to my questions were few and far between mainly because, I realized many years later, of the consequences of reduc- tionism (i.e. don’t worry about the effects, what is really relevant is the cause, that is, the economics of capitalist dynamics and class). As the Marxist historian Jeff Guy once said to me when I told him my PhD thesis includes a chapter that reconstructs the actual day of the Langa Massacre, which occurred on 21 March 1985 in the Eastern Cape town of Uitenhage, “That sounds like an excellent exercise in irrel- evant detail”. What a Marxist like Guy cannot see is that the killing of 43 people (most of whom were shot in the back) changed the consciousness of that region and the politics of resistance aimed at changing the material conditions. Eventually, I moved beyond Marxism and found in complexity theory (via systems theory) an escape from the kind of reductionism that enabled Jeff Guy to say what he did – an approach that relegates the realities of experience to the margins of analysis (or to the status of an ‘epiphenomenon’ in academic language).
We, the group that initiated the Lynedoch EcoVillage and the SI, shared a dream of creating a community within which we could bring up our children in ways that reflected our values and visions of the future. After leaving the EcoVillage in 2015, I’ve returned to the search that began so long back, but this time it is not just about the implications of being white in a racist society but what it means to be a man in a deeply misogynistic world. After several women shared with me how they were sexually assaulted, this became especially poignant and painful – the rapist’s rage and their counter-rage became the coordinates of my explorations. And here I’m not just referring to society in general but South African society in particular, which is premised on a profoundly unsustainable highly extractive economy that defined natural resources, black bodies and women as inherently exploitable objects. This is what created the obscene inequalities in wealth that nearly 25 years of democracy has done little to change, not to mention persistent violence against women and pervasive racism (see Chapter 9).
Put simply, it means facing rage: the ‘thousand years of rage’ that women and black people carry because of the accumulated damage wrought by white (mainly heterosexual) men. But that is not enough: if it stopped there, the job would simply be ‘anger management’ – how to make sure the rage does not become destruc- tive. This is the kind of thinking that “irks” Mathe so much. It is also what further inflames women’s rage – as Manto Khumalo tweeted after Winnie Mandela died in April 2018:
I am angry, very angry. I am angry for Mme Winnie, my great grandmother, my grandmother and my mother. I am angry for all the women across Africa
who are the butt of your jokes and the focus of your exploitation. I am fuck- ing angry. I am left defenceless and vulnerable.
And when confronted by these men about her anger, she cries, men will “dumb down by tweets because ‘umubi vele’ or ‘I am not like that’ ”.
Instead, the challenge for me – and indeed all men both black and white – is to discover within myself what it is that makes me misogynistic and racist. At least with respect to misogyny, this will certainly mean going beyond the biology versus culture debate (or what some refer to as the ‘essentialism versus constructionism’
debate) to accepting that it is both – the ‘othering’ of women is not simply a cul- tural outcome of the way we humans – and particularly men – get socialized by the societies we are born into. When we boys are hit by a testosterone tsunami at puberty, nothing and no one prepares us for the way our world is sexualized and transformed almost overnight. This is biology, not just culture. Noting the substan- tial and convincing literature on the historical existence of matriarchal societies (Eisler, 1996), surely the stubborn persistence of misogyny (and maybe also racism) must have deeper evolutionary roots in the way the post-matriarchal individual psyche gets constructed when separating from the mother, from nature, from the
‘other sex’ (whoever that may be) and (maybe even) from ‘the other’ race without an appropriate matriarchal nature-centred relational culture to nurture a differ- ent outcome. But as the author of the book Why Men Hate Women put it, “I do not believe that biology causes gender, but that gender provides significance to biology” (Jukes, 1993:20). In other words, biological drivers evolve within certain gendered and – by extension – racialized cultural formations that become mutually reinforcing.
Whatever the balance is between nature and culture as determinants of sexuality, the ‘other’ seems to persist against all rationality as an inherent threat to this male individual-ego at both the ‘cellular’ and ‘cultural’ levels. This must play a key role in ensuring that misogyny (as femicide), racism (as genocide) and the destruction of nature (as ‘eco-cide’) persist. Recognizing this means accepting that these destruc- tive evolutionary outcomes are now a fundamental threat to everyone’s survival, not just the multi-species that have been destroyed by these inherently destructive forces.
This has, in my view, got a lot to do with our definition of what it means to be human. Unless this changes, not much progress will be made (see subsequent pages). But for this to work, I must also tap into my own rage. Rage needs to be rescued from its place in global culture where it gets branded as a danger- ous force that needs to be contained, either forcefully or by the new modes of collaborative or partnership-based governance that seeks to ‘manage rage’
(Sloterdyk, 2006). In contrast, rage, in the words of Nigerian feminist novelist Chimamanda Adichie, needs to become a “positive force” – or, in Mathe’s words,
“anger has value”.
All the themes reflected in the experiences of my personal journey (from democratization to experimentation, South Africa’s transition to global transition,
